At one and twenty an important change took place. Lady Alicia was summoned from a little paper poodle, on whose white curls she had been bestowing peculiar pains, by the drawing-room doors being thrown open with even more than their usual solemnity, and she was informed, by his own man, that his lordship requested her presence in the library: the surprise was sufficiently great to make her cut off her little dog's tail.
The ex-minister was too important a person to be kept waiting, at least in his own family; what he now wanted in quantity of authority, he made up in quality. She descended into the large Gothic room dedicated to the learning of past ages, and the dignity of the present; a large round table stood in the middle, covered with political pamphlets, cut open, at least, most carefully, and a newspaper lying on a folio volume of Bolingbroke's. In a large arm-chair, with the Peerage in one hand, and an open letter in the other, whose seal, though broken, still showed the crimson glory of the coat of arms, sat Lord Etheringhame; and on the other side, in a chair equally erect, and in her person still more so, was the lady mother. What circumstance could have occasioned such
